Voicing Self-Worth

A Cross-Language Examination of Body Self-Esteem in FLL

Abstract

Despite existing studies of the intersection between language acquisition and learner´s identity development, little is known about the relationship between psychosocial phenomena, such as body self-esteem and foreign language learning. To address this gap, this pilot study explored the relationship between foreign language learning and body self-esteem among English and French students in higher education in central Mexico. Employing the Body Satisfaction Scale (BSS), we compared both groups´ indicators in relation to 20 body parts and 6 physical appearance criteria. Although descriptive tendencies showed that French students presented higher evaluations on intimate appeal items (e. g., sexy, erotic), than English students, no statistically significant differences were revealed by corrected independent samples t-test (all p-value  .05). Preliminary analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) identified age as a significant predictor of scores for five of the six physical appearance criteria, with small but discernible effects (partial ² = .047- .084), but language group did not show clear influence in any of the items (partial ²  .01). The study´s limited power (N = 88) excluded the identification of small-to-moderate sized effects. Findings suggest that demographic variables, particularly age, might be a stronger correlate of variance in body self-esteem than language group association in this context. Future research is needed with larger samples to explore cultural schemas of body self-esteem in language-specific representation.